Christian Little

Christian Little (b. 1982) is an American contemporary painter whose hyper-detailed, paradoxical acrylic works dissect the sterile artifice of modern voyeur culture — reality television, pornographic sets, commercials, and the carefully curated life we all now perform online.

Trained at the State University of New York at New Paltz, where he took both his BFA and MFA, Little later spent nearly five years (2015–2020) as Team Leader and Project Manager at Dan Colen's Kingston studio before devoting himself fully to his own practice.

His paintings return again and again to private rituals of self-maintenance — figures bathing, shaving, towelling off, scrubbing floors — rendered in cool, clean light and set within pristine, almost clinical interiors. These 'maintenance' tableaux are built through masterfully executed trompe-l'oeil: marble that reads as stone, rubber gloves that squeak off the canvas, soap, steam, smoke. The virtuoso surface is the point. It is self-conscious artifice, and it mirrors the self-conscious artifice of the lives his subjects — and their audiences — perform.

Little has been exhibiting internationally since 2008. His acclaimed Well Maintained solo show at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton drew wide critical attention, and his work has been presented by Sara Nightingale Gallery (Watermill, NY), Thierry Goldberg (NYC), Zieher Smith (NYC), and Zebra One Gallery in London. In 2023 his painting of a friar in a dollface mask was chosen as the cover of indie band Nation of Language's third album, Strange Disciple.